Wikipedia looks to overtake Britannica

NEW DELHI: As a regular surfer, chances are that you would have referred to Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) and perhaps contributed to it, or even edited it. Not surprisingly, it is one of the best examples of collaboration and use of open source software on the World Wide Web. Thanks to its open source nature, it costs almost zilch to create and keep it running.

Wikipedia, which boasts of content that is four times that of Encyclopedia Britannica, is also showcased as one of the most successful ventures in the open source world. Wikipedia founder Jim Wales is not stopping at that. About 1,800 communities are currently active to disseminate free knowledge and information, be it in music, politics, humour or any other area. Plans are also afoot to move to a more stable version of articles.

"Our existence depends on free software. This helps keep our cost low and also tap into a huge community of developers. We are actually trying to do something that is far beyond the limits of any proprietary software," Mr Wales told ET.

Wikipedia depends on funds from donations of $50-100, contributed mainly by people in the US, Japan and Europe. Last year it had a budget of $7,50,000 and this year it is likely to be in the region of $1.5m. "We have no plans to go for an ad-based or any other revenue model," Mr Wales said.

Interestingly, this online encyclopedia, which holds one million articles in English alone (the Queen's language is just one-third of the total content), and gets close to 48,000 visitors a day, employs only four full-time employees, besides Mr Wales. A CEO, a manager and two programmers — one in the US and another in Australia. The rest, he said, is managed by volunteers.

A core community of 2,000 to 3,000 ensures flow of new English content, corrections and modifications. Wikipedia boasts of at least 48 languages, each with articles in excess on 10,000.

Mr Wales is unfazed by the spate of controversies over issues such as vandalism and edit wars - some of them in the political domain. He believes that the online community as a whole strives for neutrality and will keep a close eye on 'Wiki'.

"In terms of quality of content, we are quite pleased but it is not yet where we want it to be," he said. Adding that the goal is to have a quality that is "better than Britannica".

Wales sees the next one or two years dedicated to moving to "a more stable version". The idea of Wikipedia 1.0, which is a concept and not a specific technique, is that we want to get to a stable version (of articles) so that we can do things like extract articles from Wikipedia to go to print or to go to DVD or CD ROM...That is difficult to do with a live site because the live site is constantly being edited, and there is a constant vandalism which is immediately cleaned up.